Information for:

Denise Finney

May 12, 2020

Assistant Professor of Biology

Denise Finney, an assistant professor of biology, is celebrating two pieces of good news related to her research this year. Her recently co-authored piece, “Predicting cover crop nitrogen content with a handheld normalized difference vegetation index meter,” was published in Agricultural and Environmental Letters. Aside from the scholarly article, she also received a $193,000 grant funded by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture to support a two-year project at the Whitaker Environmental Research Station (WERS), located near the Ursinus campus. The funding will be used to further examine critical—yet often overlooked—soil as a resource for slowing climate change. “This project will dig into plant-soil relationships to better understand how farm fields can be ecosystems that not only provide us food, but also capture and store carbon,” Finney explained. “I’m excited to be able to add new dimensions to my research on soil carbon with this grant and provide more opportunities for students to explore soil ecology. I look forward to having Summer Fellows and other student researchers work with me in the field and lab to better understand how plant roots influence the microbes that live in soil and transform carbon.”